by John Updike
FRENCHMEN
Art and Artillery
THE POET ASSASSINATED and Other Stories, by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated from the French by Ron Padgett. 139 pp. North Point Press, 1984.
Guillaume Apollinaire is the poet who, in Calligrammes (1918), reinvented the emblematic or pictographic poem and, in going over the proofs of his first collection, Alcools (1913), airily banished all punctuation, thus giving modern verse its distinctive look and syntactical freedom. He wrote prose as well—art criticism, pornographic novels, gossipy journalism, and short stories. In 1968, Holt, Rinehart & Winston published, in the format of a small coffee-table book, a translation, by the poet Ron Padgett, with sinister photographic illustrations by Jim Dine, of Apollinaire’s long, surreal story, “The Poet Assassinated.” Now, sixteen years later, Mr. Padgett and North Point Press, of Berkeley, California, have come out with an unillustrated translation of the full text of the collection, Le Poète assassiné, which Apollinaire published in 1916 and which contained fifteen shorter pieces in addition to the title story.
Mr. Padgett, however scrupulous in his translation—it reads well, and captures Apollinaire’s lazy lightness—and in thanking the many who have helped him in his prolonged labor, has not sullied this volume with any bibliographical or biographical information, whether in the form of introduction, afterword, or footnotes. Apollinaire’s eccentric and by now rather antique fictions, the implication is, speak clearly for themselves; I am not sure this is the case. The poet’s prose inventions were spontaneous and personal yet also fantastic and cunning. “The Poet Assassinated,” for instance, was much revised and added-to, as real life altered the veiled autobiographical content, and a more thorough edition than Mr. Padgett’s might have favored us with, in footnotes or an appendix, some of the excised paragraphs and altered phrases, which are a matter of French scholarly record and have been cited in such English-language biographies as those by Margaret Davies and Francis Steegmuller. The volume entitled The Poet Assassinated was assembled by Apollinaire while recuperating in a Paris hospital from a head wound suffered in battle on March 17, 1916; it included stories and sketches composed since the publication of his previous collection of short fiction, L’Hérésiarque et Cie. (1910; English version by Rémy Inglis Hall, The Heresiarch and Co., 1965). A number of the pieces had previously appeared in such magazines as Le Matin and his own Soirées de Paris; the dates of their magazine publication and of, where known, their composition would have been welcome information. If Apollinaire’s fiction deserves translation at this late date, it deserves what frame of scholarly clarification can be provided, rather than the chic starkness of this North Point edition, which gives us two pages’ worth of Mr. Padgett’s “friends and colleagues” and nothing of Apollinaire’s circumstances, motives, or models.
The story “The Poet Assassinated” runs to sixty-nine pages here; in eighteen titled episodes, or chapters, it presents a highly distorted autobiography of the author in the guise of the frenzied rise and fall of Croniamantal, “the greatest living poet.” Apollinaire was born in 1880, the illegitimate son of Angelica Alexandrine de Kostrowitzky, a twenty-two-year-old renegade daughter of a minor Polish nobleman; Apollinaire’s father, it is probable if not certain, was her lover of many years, the aristocratic Italian officer Francisco Flugi d’Aspermont, who disappeared not only from Angelica’s life but from the world at large after 1885. These muddled beginnings are outrageously parodied as the casual roadside mating of Viersélin Tigoboth, an itinerant Walloon musician, and the voluptuous and impulsive Macarée, “a dark young woman, shaped with pretty globes,” who bares her breasts at the musician, copulates “under love’s power, behind the blackthorns,” and gets back on her bicycle and pedals away. She finds herself pregnant, debates abortion with herself, and ends, after rapturously apostrophizing her own “stretchy, bearded, smooth, bombed, dolorous, round, silky, ennobling belly,” by having the child. Unlike Angelica de Kostrowitzky, Macarée gets rich at gambling, marries a baron, and dies in childbirth. The child is christened Gaétan-François-Étienne-Jack-Amélie-Alonso Desygrées, scarcely more fantastic than the string of names with which Apollinaire’s mother, at the Roman Municipal Records Office, saddled her fatherless infant—Guillaume Albert Wladimir Alexandre Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky. She always called him Wilhelm. He spent his early years in Rome with a foster family; when Guillaume was six, his mother, he, and a younger, also illegitimate brother, Alberto, moved to Monaco. There, in several schools along the Côte d’Azur, he became a good and enthusiastic student; his language became French, and his poetic vocation was well developed by the time, in 1899, that the Kostrowitzkys left Monaco and made their way, with many a detour, to Paris.
When Croniamantal’s foster father, the Baron des Ygrées, commits suicide as a consequence of gambling debts, the boy is adopted by an erudite Dutchman, Janssen, and is educated by him. When Janssen dies, Croniamantal takes his inheritance and goes to Paris “so he could peacefully indulge his taste for literature, because for some time now, and secretly, he was writing poems which he kept in an old cigar box.” The young poet is described running up the rue Houdon: “His eyes devoured everything they saw and when his eyelids came together rapidly like jaws, they engulfed the universe which was endlessly renovated by him as he ran along imagining the smallest details of the enormous worlds he was feasting his eyes on.” He visits the atelier of a painter called the Bird of Benin, and experiences the bliss of paint: “In the atelier there were joys of all colors. A big window took up the northern side and all you could see was sky-blue, like a woman singing.” The Bird of Benin announces that he has laid eyes on the perfect girl for Croniamantal: “She has the somber, childlike face of those who are destined to cause suffering. I’m telling you, I saw your woman. She is ugliness and beauty; she is like everything we love today.” This closely parallels a real incident: in 1907, Picasso, having just met Marie Laurencin in an art gallery, told Apollinaire, “I have a fiancée for you.” He introduced them, and shortly thereafter the poet moved out of his mother’s apartment to pursue the affair, which lasted until 1912. Revising “The Poet Assassinated” after the break-up with his mistress, Apollinaire substituted the phrase “destined to cause suffering” for the original “made for eternal loves,” and inserted a passage including the sentences:
Six months passed. For the last five of them Tristouse Ballerinette had been Croniamantal’s mistress, and she loved him passionately for a week. In exchange for this love, the lyrical boy had made her immortal and glorious forever by celebrating her in marvellous poems.
“I was unknown,” she thought, “and now he’s made me illustrious among all living women.
“They used to think I was generally ugly with my thinness, my oversized mouth, my horrible teeth, my asymmetrical face, my crooked nose. But now I’m beautiful and all the men tell me so.”
Though Picasso and Marie Laurencin have been firmly related to these fanciful incidents, no one has unambiguously identified Paponat, the rich “fonipoit” (in the French, “fopoîte”; that is, “faux poète”) who becomes Tristouse’s new lover, or Horace Tograth, the German who, from the unlikely launching pad of a French-language newspaper in Adelaide, Australia, inaugurates a world-wide anti-poet crusade to which Croniamantal falls victim. The poet’s assassination is a savage, though farcical, business:
And raising his cane, [a man whom the charismatic Tograth has cured of baldness] thrust it so adroitly that it burst Croniamantal’s right eye. He fell backwards. Some women fell upon him and beat him. Tristouse was prancing around with joy, as Paponat tried to calm her down. But with the point of her umbrella she went up and poked out Croniamantal’s other eye, which saw her doing it. He cried out:
“I confess my love for Tristouse Ballerinette, the divine poetry that consoles my soul.”
… The ladies stepped quickly aside and a man wielding a butcherknife laid in his palm threw it so that it stuck right in Croniamantal’s open mouth. Other men di
d the same. The knives stuck in his belly and chest, and pretty soon there was nothing left on the ground but a corpse spiked like a big sea urchin.
The literary analogy is with the death of Orpheus, torn to pieces by the Thracian women in a Dionysian orgy; the episode also foreshadows Apollinaire’s war wound, in which several shell splinters pierced his skull. Uncanny prophecy does not end there: the Bird of Benin, announcing that he is a sculptor as well as a painter, executes a memorial for the poet—a hole in the ground!—and in fact, forty years after Apollinaire’s death, a memorial statue for him by Picasso—the head of a woman!—was placed in the garden beside Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
The primary interest of “The Poet Assassinated” lies in its masked revelations of Apollinaire’s life. As a narrative, in its cold violence and clattering burlesque, it functions under the malign influence of Alfred Jarry, a self-destructive visionary whose extravagances fascinated bohemian Paris and who, toward the end of his short life, generously partook of conversation and of absinthe with the young Italian, seven years his junior. Certain rhapsodies and stretches of cultural satire show Apollinaire’s softer, irrepressibly fluent touch. A fantasy on female fashion, for instance, is put into the mouth of Tristouse:
“This year,” said Tristouse, “fashions are bizarre and common, simple and full of fantasy. Any material from nature’s domain can now be introduced into the composition of women’s clothes. I saw a charming dress made of corks.… A big designer is thinking about launching tailor-made outfits made of old bookbindings done in calf. It’s charming. All the ladies of letters would want to wear them, and one could approach them and whisper in their ear under the pretext of reading the titles. Fish bones are being worn a lot on hats.… Dresses embellished with coffee beans, cloves, cloves of garlic, onions, and bunches of raisins, these will be perfect for social calls. Fashion is becoming practical and no longer looks down on anything. It ennobles everything. It does for materials what the Romantics did for words.”
A reader at all acquainted with Apollinaire’s biography will be struck by what is suppressed, in this fantasy version, of his formative years. Angelica (or Olga, as she called herself in Monaco) de Kostrowitzky was a mother more flamboyant and tenacious than the obligingly doomed Macarée; aristocratic in bearing, with nothing of the demimondaine about her appearance, and with no sympathy for her elder son’s career in the arts, she had been a rebel against conventions since the age of sixteen, when she was expelled from an exclusive convent-academy run by French nuns for the children of the Roman nobility. She took up with the dashing Francisco, then in his forties, and after his defection became a virtual courtesan, who paraded a succession of “uncles” before her two boys and who—as revealed by documents published for the first time in Steegmuller’s biography in 1963—was ordered expelled from the principality of Monaco shortly after she arrived in 1887. She was named in this official order (which she somehow evaded, staying in Monaco for twelve years) as a “femme galante” and mentioned in a memoir of the time as an “entraîneuse”—one who “leads men on” at the gambling tables and is financed partly by the proprietors thereof. One of her admirers, a Lyonnais silk-manufacturer with bookish tastes, perhaps contributed to the shadowy persona of Janssen, Croniamantal’s protector. Her most sustained liaison, contracted in Monaco but continued in Paris until her death, was with an Alsatian gambler named Jules Weil. She herself was a devoted gambler. The insecurities the sons of such a mother endured, the deceits and pretenses forced upon them, must be mostly imagined, though in 1899 the young “Russians,” as the Kostrowitzkys were called, made the newspapers and the court records; in a case of considerable local interest in the Ardennes town of Stavelot, the two teen-aged boys (their mother and Weil having returned to Paris) were hauled into court for sneaking out of a pension without paying the bill, causing the proprietors to postpone their daughter’s wedding. Something evasive and too volatile remained part of Apollinaire. His handwriting was so changeable that his bank required him to file five or six specimens of his signature. His mother, in the months after his birth, had recorded him under three different sets of names with the Rome registry, and he ended by naming himself. Yet Olga never relinquished the role of mother, nor Apollinaire that of son. He lived with her off and on well into adulthood, and they kept in close touch. His shabby and unsettled upbringing left scarcely a shadow on his sunny, energetic personality, and almost the only complaint he committed to print is the line (from a poem, “Le Larron,” written when he was about nineteen) “Ton père fut un sphinx et ta mère une nuit” (“Your father was a sphinx and your mother a night”). “A night,” the poem goes on to say, “which charmed with its glow Zacinth and the Cyclades.” The fictive Macarée’s sexy glow is the most vivid thing about her, and she dies in a mixture of laughter and tears convenient moments after “giving the world a healthy, masculine child.”
Apollinaire emerged from childhood with the imaginative writer’s basic tool—a need to lie. His fancy served to transmute and dismiss his past. Of the fifteen shorter stories in The Poet Assassinated, a few give refracted glimpses of this past. “Giovanni Moroni” presents, as the memories of an Italian-born Parisian bank employee “of no great culture,” a sumptuous child’s Italy: “I had all kinds of toys: horses, Punches, swords, bowling pins, puppets, soldiers, wagons.… These feast days for the Three Kings, when I ate so many candied orange peels, so many anise drops, have left me with a delicious aftertaste!” Nothing is known of the Roman foster family with which the two little “Russians” were left in the pre-Monaco days, but Giovanni Moroni’s recalled household of Beppo the toymaker and his superstitious wife, Attilia, with its delicious foods, its cockroaches exterminated with boiling water (“the unfortunate bugs, whose final agitation, running, and chaotic jumping enchanted me”), its murky encounters with a young monk who is naked beneath his dirty habit and with a gang of masked carnival celebrants who leave behind a corpse, has a resonance, an unliterary richness of feeling rather rare in Apollinaire’s inventions. His first set of stories, The Heresiarch and Co., had more of this earthiness, more anecdotal force and Mediterranean color, including an obsessive interest in Catholicism and blasphemy; it was published before Alcools and Les Peintres cubistes, and it may be that, with his roles as poet and as chief propagandist for modern painting relatively undefined, the young Apollinaire tried harder as a short-story writer.
Not that some of these later pieces, tossed off though they feel, are not accomplished; the poet—who wrote many of his letters in perfect verse, it came to him so easily—was also a prolific journalist and an editor. He could do a literary job. “The Favorite,” though it ends on the note of slightly crazed misogyny that lurks like a sinister clown in Apollinaire’s imagination, begins with the sunstruck bluntness of Hemingway or Unamuno, with a symbolist touch:
It was in Beausoleil, near the Monacan border, in that part of Carnier called Tonkin and inhabited almost exclusively by Piedmontese.
An invisible executioner bloodied the afternoon. Two men were bearing a stretcher, sweating and breathing hard. From time to time they turned toward the sun’s slit throat and cursed it, their eyes almost closed.
The stories, generally no longer than three or four pages, are smoothly built about a single idea, and slide quickly toward their shrug of catastrophe. Some—“The Departure of the Shadow,” “The Deified Invalid”—are so Borgesian in tone and form that one wonders if Borges, in his continental sojourn of 1914–21, ran across them. The Borgesian theme of mental simultaneity—of all phenomena concentrating to a single point—occurs several times, and the word “atrocious” in this sentence has the Argentine’s ring: “We were walking along without talking, and, after a while, when I felt the desire to see our shadows again, I saw with a singularly atrocious pleasure [un plaisir singulièrement atroce] that Louise’s had left her.” Sometimes, Apollinaire can think of little to do with his characters but kill them (“The Meeting at the Mixed Club,” “The Eagle Hunt”). His
cruel fables have a double face, of Gothic relish and Latin stoicism. Unlike some poets launched into prose, he seems in firm control of his effects. “The Talking Memories,” as a story, is almost slick, with a satisfying “twist” at the end, like a Saki or a Roald Dahl, and “Little Recipes from Modern Magic” could appear in a contemporary humor magazine:
Incantation for beating the stock market
Every morning you will eat a red herring while uttering forty times before and after: “Bucks and plug, clink and drink.” And after ten days your dead stock will become live stock.
